The grandiloquent feudalism of the scheme appealed so strongly to the aristocratic Lords Proprietors that in spite of their usual acumen in politics they were blinded to its conflicts with their charter and to its utter top-heaviness.

By properly proportioning the poise and its distance above the wire to the resistance of the wire, the top-heaviness may be made to exactly neutralize the torsional resistance, and when this is done the beam is infinitely sensitive.